The City of Edinburgh will be the first to host an international promotion event of Rotterdam's innovative cultural policies for enforcing the participation of artists in heightening a city's competitiveness and securing social peace on the local level.

The essay 'Neo-Liberalism with Dutch Characteristics: The Big Fix-Up of the Netherlands and the Practice of Embedded Cultural Activism' is published in the book volume 'Culture and Contestation in the New Century'.

Read more about the Kanunnik Triest Square (designed by architects De Vylder Vinck Taillieu) in the Caritas psychiatric centre (Melle) and how it results from a participative process with psychiatrists, managers, staff, and patients.

From the viewpoint of architectural theory, the monopoly of urban and spatial planning in the research on the neo-liberalization of our living environment is no reason for an inferiority complex. Urban planning cannot be uncoupled from architectural interventions that function as anchor point of virtual processes and policies. More often than not the practice, form and scale of architecture even function as the very trigger for planning processes.

At the same time, it is crucial to identify neoliberalism in the architecture discipline itself. Genuine aspects of the architectural autonomy, such as practice, form and scale, do function as levers for the production of architectural surplus value. As such these autonomous aspects may also imply specific ways of distributing the architectural surplus value from one to another and the consumption of it – both can be neoliberal or not.

These arguments will be developed through case studies of contemporary architecture in the city of Antwerp, Belgium.